The Cooking Of Books : A Literary Memoir

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship that survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship that developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.

It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD scholar, and Advani a greenhorn editor with the Oxford University Press. It blossomed through the 1990s,when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years, Advani was Guha most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known narrative histories that have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible.